Esther shares early in The Bell Jar that she doesn't like children. She doesn't want to get married at least for that reason. Her date-tour of a medical center with Buddy showed her as well why she didn't want to give birth, to be objectified and manipulated. When Esther has a brief volunteeting stint at a hospital in chapter thirteen, Plath's narrative reflects Esther's perspective on birth and children.
On page 161, the very first line begins with "the flowers nodded like bright, knowledgeable children as I trundled them down the hall." Esther thinks of the flowers as she would children. Esther "felt silly in my sage-green volunteer's uniform, and superfluous... all I got for a morning of pushing round magazinds and candy and flowers was a free lunch." Esther is unfulfilled by the service, and the way she connects it to children brings to mind her lack of empathy with young people, only annoyance. Compare this to Holden Caulfield, who fails out of school as opposed to Esther's academic dedication previously.
Esther switches to comparing the flowers to cadavers. "I thought it would be discouraging for a woman who'd just had a baby to see somebody plonk down a big bouquet of dead flowers in front of her, so I... began to pick out all the flowers that were dead. Then I picked out those that were dying... This must be how they laid the bodies away in the hospital morgue."
Esther starts with children and substitutes them with corpses. When the women in maternity make a fuss over the children, this almost cements Esther's sense that women giving birth and deceived and controlled by a bad system.
Esther sees children, and herself, as already dead and gone.
